Case study: Cars.com powers on-the-lot dealership experiences and reporting using Radar

Cars.com stores and maintains geodata for thousands of Cars.com dealership partners with Radar geofences. Cars.com uses Radar to power attribution reporting for its partners and contextual experiences for its mobile app users.

The challenge

Cars.com is a leading digital automotive marketplace that connects car shoppers with sellers. The company enables dealerships to reach millions of consumers every month through meaningful digital experiences across the buying journey.

Cars.com data, operations, and product teams need to manage large amounts of dealership location information in order to power and report on these experiences.

The solution

Cars.com migrated its location data management and reporting processes from legacy systems to Radar to consolidate location initiatives into one comprehensive solution.

Radar met the needs of the Cars.com data team by providing the capabilities and flexibility required to integrate into existing reporting processes, including:

• Unlimited, polygon, and concentric geofences
• Support for existing tags, identifiers, and custom dealer-specific metadata
• Programmatic geofence exports to customer data reporting pipeline

The Radar dashboard made it easy for the Cars.com operations team to import new and update current geofences as dealerships came online or boundaries changed. Their requirements included:

• A UI for geofence visualization and import
• User-friendly geofence creation process with address search and street view
• Advanced geofence management tools to standardize processes and reduce error

The Cars.com product team saw an opportunity to use Radar to power location-based experiences, like unlocking in-app features while users are on-the-lot, easily and cost-effectively.

The results

Cars.com’s Radar-powered reporting solution reduced customer support time dedicated to updating dealership geodata by 99.9%.

After integrating Radar, we reduced the customer support time of updating car dealership geo-spatial data from 5 weeks to 5 minutes. Our solution increased data reporting efficiency, created more time for our team to dedicate to high priority initiatives, and, as a result, significantly improved customer satisfaction

The onboarding support provided by Radar was best-in-class. They were not only very helpful in advising our team on how to integrate Radar into our legacy stack, but also thoughtful about how we can see increased value in our future, cloud-based environment.

Radar has dynamically changed geolocation at Cars. Now that we have a strong foundation, we’re looking forward to expanding our location-based product offering and continuing to develop excellent digital experiences for both shoppers and sellers.

— Patrick O’Brien, Product Manager, Cars.com

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